Since last month’s launch of Minderoo’s XPrize Wildfire, a four-year global competition that will award $16 million in prize money to teams able to demonstrate fully autonomous capabilities to detect and extinguish wildfires, 68 teams have registered to compete from 14 countries, including three from Australia.
In the same period, Australia’s major science and research groups have publicly called for the government to back a “Grand Challenge” approach to identifying and backing new national science priorities. Suggested challenges include Australia becoming a clean energy superpower and having the healthiest population on earth.
“Focused and talented teams in pursuit of a prize and acclaim can change the world,” says Peter Diamandis, the entrepreneur who runs the XPrize Foundation, the biggest global brand in designing and operating large-scale incentive prizes. It has awarded more than USD150 million in prize money in the last two decades. Teams have solved challenges in fields as diverse as space, genomics; ocean (oil spill) clean up, and artificial intelligence.
Leaders in the Australian tech and innovation system have long called for a “moon shot” or “mission” approach to the nation’s research, development, and commercialisation activities. But that ambition has historically not been met in terms of both national innovation and industry policy and funding.
The pandemic was supposed to have rocked our collective sense of complacency. Add to that, the confronting realisation that AI was way more ready for prime time then we knew even six months ago.
Then came last week’s federal Budget, which was great at embracing the rhetoric of meeting grand challenges – the industrial opportunities of net-zero and green hydrogen, for example. But the funding still remains, well, “modest” is the polite word.
Australian government spending on R&D as a percentage of GDP is 0.49 per cent. Add-in business R&D investment and it brings it up to 1.79 per cent. This is way below the OECD average of 2.7 per cent, and below the Albanese Government’s pre-election aspiration of 3 per cent.
Last September, then new federal Minister for Science and Industry Ed Husic announced an overhaul of Australia’s science priorities to better reflect a modern Australia and to rally and develop new capability to solve 21st century problems.
“The current priorities do not mention First Nations knowledge, do not properly acknowledge climate change and fail to adequately engage with emerging critical technologies, which are essential for national prosperity and our wellbeing,” he said.
Australia’s chief scientist Cathy Foley is leading the overhaul process, which started with a public consultation round. Next month, the government will seek feedback on draft priorities. Come September, we are promised the finalisation of the National Science and Research Priorities and a new National Science Statement, the first since 2015.
So as the process is underway, what can we learn from Mission Models and Grand Challenge Incentive Prizes like XPrize in terms of defining and solving wicked problems?
“Large-scale incentive prize competitions are experiencing a renaissance globally,” says Catherine Ball, an advisor to the XPrize Foundation in Australia and an Associate Professor at ANU’s School of Cybernetics. “They are an important and high impact vehicle to accelerate innovative solutions, and more importantly to push those solutions beyond the theoretical or academic and into application in the real world.”
One example: in November 2021, three Australian university teams were awarded US$250,000 (AU$338,000) in the Elon Musk-sponsored XPRIZE Carbon Removal Student Competition. Groups from Monash University, the University of Sydney and the University of Tasmania were among 23 winners and received the funds to further develop their research and compete for the larger XPRIZE — a $50 million grant from the Musk Foundation.
Minderoo Foundation’s Fire and Flood Resilience Initiative Director, Adrian Turner has been a long-time proponent of using the “mission model” to solve big “system-level” problems.
Put simply, missions are cross-institutional and multidisciplinary programs to solve a quantifiable program in a defined timeframe. Obvious examples are the Apollo Program under US President, John F Kennedy or the atomic bomb program which ended World War Two.
As head of the CSIRO’s Data61 between 2015 and 2018, Turner led mission experimentation in food security and traceability.
The mission model he says, challenges the role of government from addressing market failures to shaping a domain (or several domains) more actively. This thinking is very much aligned with the economist Mariana Mazzucato’s “Mission Economy” approach to 21st century capitalism and the role of governments in shaping economic growth beyond GDP growth.
Turner and Catherine Ball stress that large-scale incentive prizes are only one manifestation of the “challenge” model for incentivising accelerated innovation. But we can learn a lot from them.
They are different from other prestigious awards like the Nobel, which honour past accomplishments and different again to traditional grant programs awarded in every discipline and, different again to the venture capital risk-funding model of spurring innovation and creating new companies.
Large-scale incentive prizes have been offered in one form or another since 1714, when the Longitude Prize was set up by the British Government to find and reward reliable ways for mariners to determine longitude accurately. That prize, like others that followed, was open to anyone and the winner was unexpected: a poor, uneducated clockmaker, John Harrison.
The modern version of incentive prizes kicked things up a notch in 2004 with the US$10 million Ansari XPrize for the first private sector group able to fly a reusable spacecraft 100km into space twice within two weeks.
It was won by a team led by pioneering aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. XPrize winners retain full ownership of their IP and funders can’t be part of the judging group.
Turner says a key takeaway already from co-designing the XPrize Wildfire initiative is getting the challenge question right.
“With any systems level problem, you must break it down to first principles, have the best suited party solve that part of the problem, then reintegrate and leverage each part with diverse parties to solve the overall problem,” he said.
“We spent a good deal of time and effort breaking down the wildfire challenge to a problem of being able to put out any dangerous fire within an hour anywhere in the country. We realised the only way to get close to that goal was real time detection of fires and fire perimeter from space.
“Then we considered the bottlenecks: sensors and a constellation to put the sensors on – a space detection track. We had a tonne of input from fire services; space agencies and publicly funded research orgs. If it works, it will change the way we fight fires.”
It’s an important insight for Government as it moves through its national science and industry policy overhaul: to be informed first by ambitious and clearly defined national challenges; and then be smart about the right mix of incentives to execute the mission and foster new companies and industries.
It is the latter which is the true measure of success for a challenge or mission model and one that is best personified by Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX enterprises. Critics of Musk often cite the hundreds of millions of dollars he has been given in government subsidies for both projects. But he has undoubtedly created new companies and industries with that money and his own and spurred whole new levels of innovation and competition in the process.
Perhaps a well-defined challenge model could solve Australia’s housing or aged crises; or even AI Trust, ethics and privacy problems. Let’s see what things look like in September when the federal government’s new science priorities are out.
